Chamois chop suey

[289, 291, 293 Church Street, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click for a much larger view, with one person at a window, another atop a fire escape..]

This tax photograph follows from last Sunday’s photograph of Needle & Thread Grill: here we see the side of the restaurant and the establishments that follow: Sidney’s Luncheonette (289), Schroeder & Tremayne Inc., Sponges–Chamois (291), and Holland Tire Distributors (293). It’s like something from the world of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer.

Schroeder & Tremayne and Holland certainly had their pick of places for lunch: if they didn’t want to walk all the way to the Needle & Thread, they could have had a quick bite at Sidney’s. There’s no listing for Sidney’s in the 1940 Manhattan directory, but Holland is in it, at a different address. Maybe the food choices drew Holland to Church Street. Or drove them away.

[Click for larger sponges.]

Schroeder & Tremayne was in business in St. Louis as early in 1918 as a wholesaler of — you guessed it — sponges and chamois. The firm made a splash with a “tasty display” at the 1918 convention of the National Association of Retail Druggists.

[N.A.R.D. Journal 26, no. 27 (1918). Click for a larger view.]

Back to food: the oddest detail in this tax photograph is CHOP SUEY, the stylized (clichéd) letters squirming every which way against a giant T. (Why?) There’s no restaurant in sight other than the Needle & Thread Grill, so the grill must have been taking its menu in a new direction.

In today’s Tribeca, Sidney’s appears to be a residential property. Schroeder & Tremayne houses apexart, a not-for-profit arts organization. Holland Tire Distributors is now OD Studio, home to a personal trainer. No spare tires to be found there, I’m sure.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

[The Pinboard link does a search: no account needed.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Stella Zawistowski. Such a challenge — I spent about an hour on the puzzle before getting stuck and driving off to our favorite restaurant for dinner. I came back with, as they say, fresh eyes, and filled in the remaining five answers in a minute, maybe less. What had been so difficult about their clues? Nothing that eggplant with beef and pad woon sen with pork couldn’t figure out.

Some clue-and-answer pairs of note (and there were many):

4-D, four letters, “Maltese Falcon force.” I can imagine many a solver getting it wrong. But I know Dashiell Hammett’s novel and John Huston’s movie.

9-D, three letters, “Big-letter word on an I-35 map north of Kansas City.” All for three letters? Let’s defamiliarize this answer a little more.

13-D, four letters, “Biker jacket.” I would say I have no clue, but I had a clue — I just didn’t understand the answer. Now I do.

15-A, nine letters, “When plants dance!” A festive thought. Reader, have you heard this expression?

16-A, five letters, “Boston Symphony’s Berkshires residence.” A giveaway, for me, and my starting point.

19-A, three letters, “Get into.” DIG, right?

21-D, five letters, “Pop group.” Again and again, this puzzle invokes and veers away from familiar phrasing.

22-D, eleven letters, “Investor’s bane.” I thought it had to be a technical term.

24-A, six letters, “Got a ticket for.” Oblique.

27-A, eight letters, “Source of ethereal sounds.” Tricky.

28-D, five letters, “Play way?” Good grief.

31-D, five letters, “‘_____ a tavola a mangiare !’ (Italian ‘Eat!’).” Who has time for all those words? I’m familiar with a simple “Mangia!” But the clue would be familiar to many solvers from the cooking show Lidia’s Kitchen.

39-A, six letters, “Incredibly close.” See 21-D.

46-D, four letters, “B, C, P, or V.” U can C Y this puzzle gave me fits.

49-D, three letters, “Saw around.” Had to be LED, like a guide, right?

52-A, nine letters, “Experimental fiction.” The modernist and postmodernist in me dislike the clue and the answer, both of which suggest a sadly narrow view of the possibilities of narrative. I never in my teaching career used either term. I would prefer to think of experimental fiction as phony lab results.

My favorite in this puzzle, because it’s so out there: 30-A, five letters, “Shoe that sounds like an apartment number.” Not experimental, just out there.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

[If you’re wondering about going out to dinner when I’m writing about Saturday’s puzzle: the puzzle comes online the day before at 4:00 p.m. Central.]

Flip

[By me. Click for a larger squirrel.]

That’s Flip, the pancake cook of Squirrel Forest.

It’s totally normal to test the shades of colored pencils on a scrap of paper, isn’t it?

Related reading
All OCA squirrel posts (Pinboard)

[Elaine said that I had to post this scrap. And just to be clear: I was testing at home, to make sure I had the right colors for my purposes.]

A happy warrior in Illinois

From the Chicago Tribune:

Gov. JB Pritzker on Thursday sought to assure Illinois residents that he would fight to preserve the state’s protections on fronts including reproductive health, immigration and LGBTQ+ rights during Donald Trump’s second term in the White House.

“To anyone who intends to come take away the freedom, and opportunity, and dignity of Illinoisans, I would remind you that a happy warrior is still a warrior. You come for my people, you come through me,” Pritzker said Thursday at a news conference in Chicago, where he made his first public appearance since the election.

“You come for my people, you come through me”: I like that. And I like “happy warrior,” which I’ve known only in relation to Alfred E. Smith, who’s now camped in our living room, in the pages of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker. I had no idea that the phrase “happy warrior” derives from a poem by William Wordsworth (inspired by Lord Horatio Nelson) and that it’s been applied to any number of post-Smith politicians.

Recently updated

Other thoughts on the election I’ve added Adam Kinzinger.

Beautiful afternoon, ugly moment

We were walking one of our several routes this afternoon. “Uh-oh,” I said to Elaine.

Far down the street, a house now displayed a large sign. It went up only after the election — that seemed odd. The homeowner, an old guy, was walking out to the middle of the street and pointing to his sign. He must have spotted us and remembered us from the days before the 2020 election, when we gave a thumbs-down to a previous sign every time we walked past his house.

As we neared, he walked toward us, pointing to his sign and yelling about how they won. I said some things about the character of his hero. Elaine said some things too. “Bullshit,” he said. I then asked him, “Would you want your daughter to marry him?” No answer. I asked him three times. He said that I must have trouble speaking — he couldn’t understand me.

Post-walk, Elaine refined my question into un esprit de l’escalier, or maybe un esprit de la rue: “Would you leave your pretty granddaughter in a room alone with him?”

I’m now saving that question for possible future use. And if the reply is something along the lines of He may not be a good husband but I’m choosing a president, the next question would be how someone unwilling to honor a promise to a partner can be trusted to honor an oath to the U.S. Constitution.

Or maybe we should just send pizzas.

[Putting up a sign only after your guy wins is a pretty chickenshit move, is it not?]

Eyes

Guy de Maupassant, Alien Hearts. 1890. Trans. Richard Howard (New York: New York Review Books, 2009).

Related reading
All OCA Maupassant posts (Pinboard)

Other thoughts on the election

Some thoughts on the election, all via Substacks and other subscriptions: Noah Berlatsky, Mona Charen, Mark Hurst, Bess Kalb, Robert Reich, Heather Cox Richardson, Margaret Sullivan.

I’m not prepared to discuss them; I just want to share resources that might be off a reader’s radar.

*

One more: Adam Kinzinger.

A message

I was in a committee meeting with co-workers, all of us sitting at a conference table in a large otherwise vacant room. The subject under discussion was a letter from the FCC about the aroma of our new movie, which had been deemed unsatisfactory. We were looking at clips from older black-and-white movies to figure out an appropriate aroma.

The window at one end of the room was open, and a young man climbed through it and into the room. He was dressed as one might imagine an office intern would be dressed, in a short-sleeve dress shirt, tie, and khaki pants. He was carrying a cat under one arm and had a message for our committee. He had climbed up the side of the building, at least three or four stories, to enter through the window and deliver the message. He handed the message to someone at the table and walked back to the window. “Ready?” he said to the cat. And still holding the cat under one arm, he climbed out to make his way down to the street.

And then we got back to work.

Likely sources: movies that stink, FCC in a crossword, the fourth-season finale of Only Murders in the Building, election results (letting the cat out of the bag?), and the Steve Kornacki look.

“And then we got back to work” sounds like a good idea. No giving up.

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[“Only fools and children talk about their dreams”: Dr. Edward Jeffreys (Robert Douglas), in Thunder on the Hill (dir. Douglas Sirk, 1951). This dream happened a few nights ago, not last night.]

What now?

Our household went to sleep sometime after midnight, when the handwriting was already on the wall. It is astonishing to me — because I’m always an optimist, I suppose — that American voters have chosen a dementing racist and misogynist, a twice-impeached convicted felon, a malignant narcissist, serial philanderer, and adjudicated rapist to lead their country. They have chosen a fascist in a girdle and lifts who projects a bizarre sort of supposed strength and stokes an irrational fear of an other, whether the other is a trans kid or an immigrant or a Democrat. (Hi, my name is The Enemy Within.) And American voters have chosen an aspiring autocrat who has promised to weaken our alliances, to prosecute his political enemies, to end any effort to reverse climate change, to end the Affordable Care Act, to end women’s reproductive rights, to hand healthcare policies over to a nutcase, and to build concentration camps as the prelude to mass deporations. I could go on.

If your only concern is the price of a loaf of bread (on PBS last night, David Brooks helpfully told us that it’s $1.93), you’ll vote for the strongman. The cost of groceries is a legitimate concern. But so is the cost of healthcare. And so is everything else. A vote based on the cost of a loaf of bread might come at a much greater cost.

All I will add is that I won’t obey in advance. And I won’t despair.

[I keep tinkering with this post. No moving on from it, not today.]